This has been a great year thanks to some new innovations that the Multirotor Design Team at Missouri S&T has accomplished. This year, we have moved on from building a drone for a rocket and onto building a much larger one capable of payload delivery and object identification. We have been able to successfully identify objects with drones. A large part of this is how we can depend on the plug and play abilities of the CubePilot products and focus our resources into coding our programs and building a strong project. Our cubes have been through a multitude of crashes including falling from a rocket and even sustaining a direct impact causing a dent and we have not encountered a single issue due to these impacts. The ruggedness of these products is beyond compare.
This year, our team has developed a whole new testing platform on a 6in drone with sonar, gps, and complete autonomous capabilities. This drone is able to detect objects in it’s surroundings and react based on those inputs. It is also a platform for our software division to test flight code and obstacle avoidance without the risk of crashing a larger more expensive drone.
Finally, we have been developing a completely new fully autonomous coaxial quad with 20in props. This drone will be able to fly miles with a single charge and deliver payloads of water bottles to points it identifies on the ground. It will use at least one Here GPS, RTK, Sonar, a Sony camera on a gimble, and, of course, a Cube Orange Plus. From our initial tests, this will be one of the most stable platforms we have developed.